Electrical connectors having housings that are made of more than one piece where the pieces interengage and are staked together, are either assembled in a complex and expensive machine, or are assembled by hand and staked in a manually operated press, one stake position at a time. For example, one type of connector housing is composed of two outer shells or halves, each of which have pins that project through holes in the other half. The two halves are manually assembled and placed in an arbor press, having appropriate staking tooling. The first pin is then aligned with the tooling and the press operated to stake the pin, then each pin in turn is similarly staked. This, of course, is cumbersome and inefficient and requires that the operator be able to consistently align the pin to be staked accurately with the tooling. Such a procedure is useful only with very small production runs or for single units. For medium sized production runs, where the large automated machine is too expensive, a smaller and less expensive alternative is desirable.
What is needed is a simple manually operated tool that will hold the two housing halves together and accurately stake all of the pins on each side of the connector simultaneously with a single stroke of the press by the operator.